


Piper Maru

by leiascully



Series: The FBI's Most Unwanted [75]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Black Oil | Purity (X-Files), Episode Related, Gen, X-Files OctoberFicFest 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:02:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22126060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: Mulder had seen any number of possessions, including the gargoyle haunting his former colleague, but the black oil was something else.
Series: The FBI's Most Unwanted [75]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/249118
Kudos: 4





	Piper Maru

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: 3.15 "Piper Maru"  
> A/N: For the Inktober prompt "ride".

The people were the vessels and their passenger was dark and secret. Mulder had seen any number of possessions, including the gargoyle haunting his former colleague, but the black oil was something else. It was sentient in a way he hadn’t seen. It had a survival instinct stronger than anything in his files. He wasn’t entirely sure how it worked yet. Scully would be able to riddle her way through the mechanics of it, unraveling the puzzle of chemistry and anatomy. Mulder would stick to the psychology of it. How did oil seep into a man’s brain? How did oil ghost through a woman’s eyes? How did it choose its victims, and how did it choose to defend itself? 

The oil was strong. It rode along, using people as transportation, manipulating their ideas, using their hands as its own tools. It oozed improbably between hosts. It switched metaphorical horses midstream. 

Another X-File. Another article, one day for Scully’s cryptozoology journal, though the oil they’d tested from the residue on the Frenchman had just been light crude, nothing special. 

Mulder blinked and for a moment, jet lag blurred his vision and he thought he saw oil smeared across his field of view. He rubbed his knuckles into his eyes and inspected them. Clean. He wasn’t a host for it yet. He would make it home unscathed, unirradiated. He would make it back to interrogate Scully about her esoteric knowledge of old planes.


End file.
